I’ve said before that my first real girlfriend wasn’t the “girl next door,” but the most beautiful, most popular girl at school—the one who always stood in the middle in photos because everyone looked at her, whether they wanted to or not.
What I haven’t written about is that I had to wait until nearly eighteen for my first real love.
All through high school I didn’t feel I needed anything more than a lot of one-night stands. I didn’t want evening walks, cuddling, trips together, movie dates. I was only interested in girls’ bodies. There were a few I met once or twice a year and spent an evening the same way. There was one who got half an hour of me in an empty, grimy doorway—and I never saw her again. Now I know that in those “best” years the very thing that could have made them truly beautiful was missing—a partner.
Here’s a short story that sums up who I was then: I was seventeen, got tangled up with a girl far too early at a weekend party. We hardly talked; by dawn she was at my place. She went home around six and I promised we’d go somewhere in the afternoon. Of course, I never called.
A week later we were getting ready for a Balaton party and I stopped by her place. A beautiful, slightly older woman opened the door.
— Hi, I’m looking for your sister.
— Come in. I’m her mother.
That night I was the “king” at our usual hangout—the guy who had also been with his girlfriend’s mother.
But back to my first love. When I met her, she was just one of many girls in the group. Tall, slim, a bit reserved, very pretty—but nothing that made me notice her then. One Saturday my friends invented a game: you had to pick up and kiss the chosen girl within ten minutes. The prize was a bottle of champagne. She was the target. She was dancing on the tiny dance floor of the local “disco.” Hungária’s Ciao Marina was playing (my stomach still knots when I hear it).
I pushed through the crowd—no chance for small talk; even “hi” had to be shouted—so I didn’t leave it to chance:
— Look, the guys will buy me a bottle of champagne if I kiss you right now. We’ll split it?
— Sure, she said.
I won the champagne — and, as it turned out later — her. She stayed with me all evening. She even suggested we meet the next day.
From then on I wanted to be with her every day. After school I didn’t go home; I went straight to her place. I sat in her room—sometimes we just looked at each other, other times we talked for hours about everything and nothing. No big plans, yet those afternoons felt like another world where there was no homework, no future, no past—just her.
Her room was full of little things: posters fading in the sun, a blanket from her grandmother on the bed, perfume bottles on the shelf whose scent mixed with her hair. Sometimes we just shut the door and lay there, not even touching, but the air was thick with a tension I couldn’t name back then.
I quickly got to know her family—well, her mother. We talked a lot, and she let her daughter go anywhere with me, as if I were an old family friend. Funny thing is, it stayed like this in my later serious relationships too: parents somehow always adored me. Sometimes I felt they liked me more than their daughters.
That always reminds me of another girl I spent many nights with. They had a huge house, and we… made use of it. We did it in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the upstairs lounge, even in her parents’ bedroom. She never held back; she “commentated” loudly on everything we did. At first it embarrassed me, then I got the hang of it and started to enjoy her play-by-play.
One evening I was sitting with her father in the living room, watching a match and chatting. Suddenly we heard her upstairs in her room, talking on the phone with her friend. Every word was crystal clear. I was mortified—if we could hear this well, the whole family must have heard what we did every night… and they were still perfectly kind to me.
Sorry. I’m rambling. Back to her room, the quiet, and what hid inside it. Intimacy built up between us very slowly. It took weeks before I got under her blouse. She was shy and it showed in every movement. If my hand wandered a bit too far, she tensed like a cat unsure whether a stroke or a swipe was coming. Weeks of quiet attempts, watching each other’s reactions. Sometimes we stopped and just talked, as if both of us were dragging out the moment so we wouldn’t have to cross an invisible line.
By then we’d been together two months. We were watching a movie in her room, and I undressed her slowly and patiently. Around the middle of the film she was completely naked. Nothing rushed or dramatic happened—she just lay next to me, snuggled up, and relaxed like never before. It was as if her whole body said: I’m safe now.
Then came the cracks. She didn’t come to my graduation ceremony. The next day there was a family event. On the third day—the Sunday before my finals—we walked all afternoon. She was strange, quiet. In the evening we said goodbye and, just before I got on the trolleybus, she told me she’d slept with her ex and gone back to him.
And that, maybe, hurt most. I was the one who opened the door of physical intimacy for her. Slowly, carefully, step by step I led her through the gate and she walked it with me—then tossed me aside. A broken heart is one thing: you swallow hard and try to pull yourself together. This was different. It felt like nothing had been true. That I hadn’t mattered. I’d been a tool—something to help her loosen up, to try things—and then hand herself over to someone else.
I don’t remember how I got home. The next morning I took my Hungarian exam, went home, and a good friend was waiting outside. That’s when something snapped. I cried like a little kid. He thought I’d messed up the exam. When I told him what had happened, he just stood there, not knowing what to say.
We met a few more times—we were in the same crowd. Not for long; acquaintances are easier to replace than friends. I had no trouble finding new company.
I graduated and got into medical school. That summer we kept score at Kálvin tér of who picked up how many girls. I lost, 19 to 17, because of a “tactical” mistake—but that’s another story.
The old me returned, but it wasn’t the same. The blind teenage momentum was gone. Something had shifted. A thought kept nagging me: maybe there’s another way.
That summer I grew close to the girl who later became my first wife. By September I had a real girlfriend again, and later another love arrived. In the end—though it wasn’t easy—I moved past the one-night stands. I still slipped back sometimes, but I didn’t feel good in it anymore. The body alone wasn’t enough; I needed something behind it—something I’d barely known then: substance.
That winter I sent her a gift: a selection of Ady’s poems (Margita Wants to Live) bound together with a few poems of my own. Back then I’d had my first reading as a “young poet” (needless to say, I gave it up—probably for the best).
She didn’t bother to reply.
We waited, we were noisy—yet silently
memory crept back into us,
and in our sword-gripped hands, Margita’s name
the blades sang out, all blood-bright.
It was May, and still we felt no Spring,
as at dawn I wandered with Ottokár:
“If she returned,” he sighed, hoarse,
“I’d tell her I never loved her.”
(Ady Endre: Ha visszajönne Margita)